oddkin | unfinished_configurations

"Trouble is an interesting word. It derives from a thirteenth-century French verb meaning 'to stir up,' 'to make cloudy','to disturb.' We—all of us on Terra—live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response. Mixed-up times are overflowing with both pain and joy—with vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy, with unnecessary killing of ongoingness but also with necessary resurgence. The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present.

Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent responses to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places. In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.

...Staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all."

Donna Haraway in Staying with the Trouble

prompt and image will appear here in seconds...

oddkin | unfinished_configurations

This app leverages the captivating beauty of jellyfish and the potential of bioluminescence to create a synthetic counterpoint with Haraway's text. Drawing on the ideas and themes from "Staying with the Trouble" by Donna Haraway, the app encourages users to explore the complex and mixed-up times we live in and consider our relationship with the natural world and what we consider artificial or synthetic. The app chains calls to both the Davinci model and Dall-e to generate prompts, questions and images inspired by Haraway's text and my strange dreams with biolumiscent jellyfish in the depths of earth oceans. The models are used in chain unfinished_configurations in order to generate infinite black and white images of jellyfish that highlight their natural beauty, synthetic provenance, ephemeratily and awe. Through this combination of synthetic media and the interplay of text and visuals, the app encourages users to engage with complex and challenging ideas about nature and culture in a new and innovative way. By highlighting the natural beauty of jellyfish, the evocative potential of bioluminescence and its synthetic generation, the app encourages us to see the urgency and the beauty simultaneously. By exploring these ideas through the lens of Haraway's text, the app encourages us to reflect on our own relationship with the natural world and consider how we can respond to the challenges when facing alien entities such as jellyfish and perhaps AI models. They are beatiful and ephemeral oddkins.

Concept and programming by Marlon Barrios Solano

Support R&D and help with the costs of OpenAI